EMPIRICAL STUDY OF SOFTWARE INTERFACE FAULTS.

We demonstrate through a survey of the literature on software errors that the research community has paid little attention to the problem of interface errors. The main focus of the paper is to present the results of a preliminary empirical study of error reports for a large software system. We determined that at least 66% of these errors arose from interface problems. The errors fell naturally into fifteen separate categories, most of which were related to problems with the methodology.